City of Chandler Leverages HMI/SCADA to Ease Reporting and EPA Compliance

The City of Chandler, Arizona, generates a monthly operations report on its wastewater treatment facility. This report is used both internally and for Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) compliance. Its automation system, powered by GE Vernova's HMI/SCADA software, supervises the plant operations, acquiring data from an array of PLCs and then logs results into a Microsoft SQL database.

The City partnered with Carollo, a systems integrator, to help implement a new solution for more efficient reporting.

Time- and labor-intensive reporting

The City was using an Excel spreadsheet to query data, update calculations and generate the required reports. This was both time consuming and labor intensive, requiring a specialized skillset that was not always available.

Also, the existing method did not offer any long-term document management, which would be beneficial for the organization and make retrieval of past results more efficient. The City needed an out-of-the-box solution that would interface with its existing solution and as well as future automation systems—without the need for programming, scripting or technology integration.

Easy, flexible, web-accessible reporting tool

Carollo helped implement Dream Report, a purpose-built reporting tool for the world of automation. It delivers the statistics that are common to water and wastewater applications – as well as standardized reporting for other industries without the need for any creative math and logic, and provides flexible report generation, report access, and long-term document management.

Dream Report supports all kinds of database formats and will also adapt to various record date and time formats, making it readily configurable whereby no programming is necessary to make it work. This translates into seamless integration with GE Vernova's HMI/SCADA software to help the City easily leverage its automation data to generate the reports it needs to improve performance and meet operational goals.

The solution also delivers a web portal with the ability to both display past reports and ad hoc interactions with process data through the use of report templates, with user configurable dates, times and data queries and the access to information via a web browser or mobile devices.